


Danach

by YumeArashi



Series: The Nocturn Arc [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Hunting, M/M, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-14
Updated: 2013-01-14
Packaged: 2017-11-25 11:32:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/638441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YumeArashi/pseuds/YumeArashi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gabriel ponders his motives for bringing a Hunter to his home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Danach

* * *

 

I lay you down gently in my bed, settling in a chair beside you.  I watch you sleep, still a little uncertain why I brought you home with me.  Your face is slack with the slumber of total exhaustion, but already I see lines of pain that weren’t there an hour ago.  My earlier words echo through my mind.

You are like me.

I surely never spoke truer words.  I remember being like you, trying to accept that the people I had known and loved, my friends and my family, now hated me.  Not for a choice I had made, or a thing I had done, but for what I had become.

Like me, you are now outcast.  My heart aches for the ruined innocence your self-knowledge cost.  When you wake, you will have to come to terms with the fact that you no longer have a place in the life you have known.  I could help you forget when the pain was too much, but no one can hide from the truth forever.  I know it too well.

I remember the Cataclysm, the terrifying explosion of magical energy that took us, twisted us, turned us into monsters.  I remember the wars that followed when the remaining humans discovered what we were.  I remember becoming the Hunted, harried and driven into the dark places of the world by our former brothers.

The others had returned the newborn hatred in equal measure, turning their backs on humankind. They chose humans as their prey, scorning weakness and taking pride in their own lack of humanity.  But though I wanted to do the same, to take refuge from the pain in anger, I could not.  Hatred has never been in my nature.

I fled from the others and went into hiding.  Few now are the Hunted who remember the Cataclysm; some have been the target of successful hunts, some have been killed by other Hunted, and some, weary with this unending existence, have simply chosen to die.

An attractive fate, that.

I have never been sure what it is inside me that has kept me going all through the long centuries, have never known what whispered hope to my anguished soul.  To have been cut off from humanity had been painful enough, but to have been declared outcast by the only brethren I had left was excruciating.  I had always been a social creature.  I loved people, loved talking to them, spending time with them, helping them through the daily agonies of life and love. 

Despite the risk I run, I can’t help going to the human villages sometimes.  I haunt the edges of town for a while, watching them.  Their quarrels, their loves, their friendships, their children.  It’s the only way I have to keep such things from becoming only a memory to me.

But sooner or later, my presence is felt, and I leave before the Hunters arrive.  I retreat to the ghost towns, taking painful solace in the companionable emptiness.  I suppose I must have known that before long one would manage to track me.  Like many of the other Elders before me, I was seeking an end to an existence grown too painful to endure. 

Was it fate that brought you to me, unique among the Hunters as I am among the Hunted, ending my previous existence as surely as any weapon could have?  Was it fate that just as I tired of holding on, you would arrive to give me a new reason to stay?  I smile, a little ruefully.  I was always too tender-hearted for my own good.  But when I looked in your eyes and saw my own doom, I couldn’t turn you away.

Watching your sleeping face, I think I understand what kept me all those years.


End file.
